Category: Opera

The very first Alpha build of the next generation Opera browser codenamed Swordfish has been just released.

One of the new features in the following version is an interactive Speed Dial. Users can now enhance its functionality by adding extensions, such as: weather, live news feeds, email notifications and more.

In addition to that, Opera 11.50 includes password synchronization and with the help of Opera Next, you can now play with dev builds without affecting your main browser installation.

If you are curious enough to try Opera 11.50, here is a download link. Bear in mind that this is the development snapshot and is not intended for daily use.

Three security advisories were released for rival browsers by Microsoft today, two of which for Chrome and one for Opera. Said bugs were spotted by researchers at Microsoft and brought to the attention of the security teams in charge of Opera and Chrome. Opera patched the bug in October of 2010 while Google fixed the vulnerabilities last September and December.

According to Mike Reavey, the director of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), the change is part of an expansion of the vulnerability disclosure policy launched by Microsoft the previous summer. These advisories were the first to be issued by Microsoft for vulnerabilities found in third party software. Other advisories will follow as necessary.Continue Reading

If the Wall Street Journal reports are to be believed, then the upcoming version of Apple’s Safari web browser (that comes with Mac OS X Lion) will include an option for users to disable tracking via cookies.

The recent Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4 releases already include “Do Not Track” functionality and with Safari soon to follow, Google Chrome and Opera are the only browsers that leave their users behind.

Since the “close button bug” is already reported, it was not included in the video.

Just like with the few previous major new builds, I believe that this release is rushed and shouldn’t have been labeled as the “Final” in the first place. But then again, maybe those things do not happen to other users and 11.10 is in fact as solid as rock.

UPDATE:

Tiffany Brown from Opera Software was kind enough to explain pretty much all the mentioned bugs.

Speed Dial Reload bug:

I think what you’re seeing with Speed Dial has to do with changes we have made to that feature. It *appears* to reload, but doesn’t actually fetch new content unless you (or the site’s developers) have actually enabled automatic refreshing.

Payoneer

The issue is related to how Opera 11.10 is calculating the offset on that page. The fix is to use clientHeight if it is larger than offsetHeight. I will reach out to Payoneer’s development team. Sometimes things change between versions. Opera 11.10 reports offsetHeight correctly, but somehow the menu script on their site is not recognizing that.

It looks like not everyone is digging the native HTML5 marketing claims from the software giant.

With the launch of Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 1, Microsoft had to say the following:

Web sites and HTML5 run best when they run natively, on a browser optimized for the operating system on your device. We built IE9 from the ground up for HTML5 and for Windows to deliver the most native HTML5 experience and the best Web experience on Windows. The only native experience of the Web of HTML5 today is on Windows 7 with IE9.

Mozilla’s former director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner, was quick to respond, ridiculing the term on Bugzilla, the company’s bug tracking database.Continue Reading